Ninestar is an innovation oriented enterprise. A patent management organization was established at the very beginning of the enterprise’s foundation as well as a complete set of rules and clearly stated terms and duties of each patent department. Ninestar is dedicated to the R&D of toner cartridges and their related patents, and has formed a proprietary patent system used for the manufacturing of printers and toner cartridges. Now, Ninestar's IP research team consists of many IP lawyers and engineers, and has employed many consultants from world’s famous law firms to build a complete IP management team and institute.

1. Attentions from the management team

The management team pays attention to the enterprise’s patent R&D and risk avoidance. Mr. Jackson Wang, CEO of Seine Group has provided large financial human resource input with the thought that patent R&D is the core competitive srtength of the enterprise. In the last 3 years, over six million Yuan(RMB) has been invested in to the R&D of patents, which takes up about 18% of the whole R&D investment. This proportion is much higher than the industry’s average. Attention from the management team is a key factor for a task’s efficiency.

2. An orderly institute

We has established a special patent office. Toner cartridge patent team
is a subordinate of the office in charge of toner cartridge related
patent search, analysis and application. In 2008, Ninestar established a
legal team to manage all the patents and related lawsuits. In 2009, the
printer division was established as well as the printer patent team.
After 2010, the toner cartridge patent team was merged into the supplies
division. Recently, there are 8 peoples in toner cartridge patent team,8 in the printer patent team and 6 in the
lawsuit team. These talented people are all with engineering background,
and have years of experience in R&D. In addition, these people are
all familiar with patent search, analysis and judging, which provides
strong backup to the enterprise’s patent operation.

A professional internal patent institute strongly ensures the implementations of the tasks related to patent.

3. Complete regulations

A set of regulations has been made to ensure all the implementation of
patent tasks, which includes patent application, financial award,
security of technology, cooperation contract management. Please see
below for more detail

4. Detailed jobs

Daily jobs of patent management office include

- Build communication mechanism to implement patent analysis and risk avoidance suggestion
- To propose patent application project, communicate with external agents to prepare the application tasks
- Regularly monitor the patent application and authorizations of the competitors and analyses their proposals
- Advice for the main direction of R&D
- Advice for the management team
- Advice for the management team when potential patent risk is discovered
- Advice for the management team technically in business merger and cooperation

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF NINESTAR INKJET CARTRIDGES

Patent overview of Ninestar inkjet cartridge

Ninestar is a global leading imaging consumables brand with technological superiorities. Innovation is one of Ninestar corporate spirits. Ninestar has focused on product innovation through proprietary technologies and applied for about 100 new patents on the inkjet cartridge per year since its foundation. According to incomplete statistics, from early 2003, Seine, the parent company of Ninestar has applied for 218 domestic and international patents in about 22 countries to protect its inkjet R & D investment and maintain long-term development.

Ninestar's opinion upon patent lawsuits Communication with the OEMs

Some OEMs will send out lawyers letter as a warning before legal action,while some of the compatible consumable manufacturers choose to ignore the letter until the OEMs start the legal action. Ninestar emphasizes early communication with the OEMs,for example, when customers received the lawyers letter, Ninestar legal consultant will initiatively communicate with the OEM on behalf of the customers to clarify our attitude based on the real situation in order to resolve the disputes before legal action thus to protect the customers. Ninestar global legal partners are dedicated to minimizing the IP risk for its customers.